timber - i greatly respect your legal opinion, however you're making a leap of interpretion i dont agree with.
that is, you call marriage a combination of financial and social partnering (i accept the extension of my "business merger" analogy). then, you go on to define what constitutes an acceptable social partnership in terms of the what the majority do
as a result of getting married.
more to the point, those things you listed are not pre-requisites to a social partnership - they are the results in many cases, but not they are not the causes except with rare exceptions.
take the incestual procreation example. sure, we want to prevent brothers and sisters from having children for the reasons you stated. so let's outlaw their procreating, not their choice to live together, in a shared home, with shared benefits and responsibilities until the day they die.
ps - if i had a girlfriend, my wife would kill me. [img]tongue.gif[/img] [img]smile.gif[/img]
[ 11-19-2003, 06:56 PM: Message edited by: sultan ]